Two med-tech accelerate winners touted for commercial success

THE COMPANY behind a post-stroke brain-monitoring system, and another company with a cloud-based healthcare information platform have won the TCELS Life Sciences & MedTech Acceleration Programme 2017 competition.

Brain Dynamics and MEiD won Bt2 million after their demonstration-day pitches won over the judges from the event, which was hosted by the Thailand Centre of Excellence for Life Sciences (TCELS) in cooperation with Expara, a Singaporean venture capitalist.

Brain Dynamics is an innovative medical device company that has developed a brain monitoring system to enhance post-stroke rehabilitation efficiency. MEiD is a cloud-based healthcare information platform.

TCELS’ deputy director, Chairat Sangchan, said that Brain Dynamics and MEiD were two among eight teams that attended the three-month accelerate programme, which provided mentorship and incubation on the life sciences and biotechnology as well as business and marketing

The winners distinguished themselves on product and scalability, as well as in intellectual property (IP) and having deep technology, which increased the strength of their innovation and the chances of growth success in the global market.

The role of TCELS is to match researchers and investors as well as to facilitate the journey to commercialise their research and development in the market.

“TCELS plays a key role in developing, supporting and encouraging entrepreneurs to initiate life-science start-up businesses pertaining to the government policy,” said Chairat.

Meanwhile, Douglas Keith Abrams, founder and director of Expara (Thailand) said that developing a life-science start-up in Thailand is a great start for those Thai companies developing products and services related to the global trends in life-science technologies. They are also playing an important part that helps in Thailand’s drive to become the medical hub of Asia, said Abrams.

The 2017 iteration was the second batch of the TCELS Life Sciences and MedTech Acceleration Programme. TCELS first started the program in 2016 under the name Mini Life Science Mentorship Program 2016, but without a co-host or pitching programme on the demo day.

“We got 13 potential life science and bitotechnology teams in our mentorship programme,” said Chairat. “Only three teams were winners – two of them have now commercialised their research.”

One winner’s hair-related business has expanded to the Vietnam, Indonesia, and Bangladesh markets, helping generate economic value of Bt50 million, said Chairat.

In 2018, Chairat said, TCELS will expand features of the programme by adding a “global connect programme” that will help winning teams to go global through TCELS’ connection network.